Ok... I licensed Outlook 2010 and I am now using it as my main E-mail application. If I was ready to fork-out $130 to buy Outlook, then I certainly would have been ready to pay PS for an updated Barca. (sigh)

Now to figure out if it's possible to move my stored Barca mail messages into Outlook 2010. At this time, I need to keep Barca on my computer just to be able to access those stored messages. And no, forwarding all of those messages back to me is unrealistic

robin wrote:Yet there are some features on Poco that I won't give up, despite using Outlook at work (Exchange and all that).

I haven't done it for a few years (retired) but several years ago I had Poco/Barca running as the client with Exchange back end. A few small glitches but worked well... supposed it healped that I was an admin on the exchange servers. LOL

I keep coming back to the site to check for an update on Barca, but I do not high hopes. As others, I am looking for other products to replace Barca. I did not find anything exact.
So far, I am testing Essential PIM and like it.
The only thing it is missing are color tags in email module; other than it, it is a good product.

Slaven told me a while back (a month ago) just before this forum went down... that he was hoping to work on it but didn't seem to promise much. I have the text somewhere in my "officially" adopted Thunderbird data bank (btw, i can sync it with Google Calendar and Contacts for free) but his words don't convey a sense of interest nor promise any immediate or remote release of anything.

Yes, i've tried Postbox lite but with all the extensions that are compatible with Thunderbird (and not with Postbox), i just can't switch over. Even less with the price tag they have for the pro version.

If this is going to be the thread of official defections, you can increment the count by one. I began a "test" of openSUSE 11.3 Linux in July after a problem with Windows XP looked fixable only by a full system reinstall, and I basically haven't been back in Windows since. I'm using Kontact/Kmail now, and while there's some polish I miss from pocomail, there's also some nice modern features - and an actual announced development timeline, and actual development! While Pocomail runs fine in Linux using the WINE windows libraries, I think I'm going to finish porting all of my old messages over and pull the plug on Poco and Windows together.

It's rather a shame. I'm assuming this Slavin person has another job from whence his income derives so he has no motivation to worry about Poco - or salaries to pay. I used to be part of a company with only two full-time employees, and went as far in the time before affordable cell phones to install a tech support line in my home (due to customers being on the other side of the continent it was not unusual for them to have questions at 8PM my time), carry a beeper, and even not take vacation for eight years in case I was away and one of our customers had a problem! The folks behind Poco might be great developers, but they're poor business people. At this point I wouldn't use a product from Poco systems no matter how good it was due to the clear way they treat their exceedingly loyal (and patient) customers.

"From the correspondence I had with him in the past few months, I understand that Pocomail will continue being supported and developed, no sign of the opposite."

Development doesn't count unless something's actually released. If not, there's no functional difference between "in development" and "discontinued". Duke Nukem Forever was "in development" for 10+ years, but that didn't mean anything to the fans who never got a finished game.

I was the sole developer using the same tool past versions of Pocomail were written with (Delphi) while also providing all the technical support and doing analysis work for clients, and it certainly didn't take years to produce software that was used in Fortune 1000 companies. If Poco Systems couldn't deliver in a timely fashion, the business decision to bring on extra help or engage outside contractors or Delphi developers to assist with parts of the development should have been made. Delphi is a rapid application development platform and numerous third-party components exist for all sorts of functions (Poco's existing HTML engine is actually a third-party component and not written by Poco, for instance). There can't be even one developer working on it 4+ hours a day for over a year with nothing to show for it. There have been 13 Twitter posts over the past few days, coming from a Mac, no less. There's no excuse in the world for not posting information here or in an e-mail to existing users. He's busy? Fine. Then simply don't go home/to bed until it's done. Present and past employees of small businesses know what it's like to pull an all-nighter and get to bed at 5AM in order to meet a deadline.

Here's a hint to remaining users/faithful: when a thread about the current status of a product includes the line "In December 2009 I did have contact with Slaven, so that does mean something, I think", it's safe to consider your product discontinued. When Waldo has been spotted more recently than your developer, you know you're in trouble. As it is, my previous e-mail program was the ahead-of-its-time MailCat, and I finally had to concede that support for it was pretty much dead and it was time to look for a new program when its fix for the year 2000 bug didn't appear until February 2000. It was no fun sending e-mails for two months that were dated in the year 1900.

MonBidoux, there are some current and many former (like me) Delphi developers who would love a crack at PocoMail's code. It could blow the leading open source Thunderbird out of the water. I tried Thunderbird and was quite disappointed to observe that it couldn't even minimize to system tray without a third-party plugin.

To everyone else, good luck with Pocomail still doing whatever you need it to do, and when it reaches the point that it can't, finding a viable replacement. It was quite a piece of software, and ranks on my top five programs of all time for its combination of extreme power and customizability. I hope to see y'all in 2019 as we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the last Pocomail update!

Thunderbird has the simple advantage of being free.
It it also being updated on a regular basis.
In many ways i prefer it even over Outlook which costs you know how much.

Before the days of Poco and Barca, i enjoyed Courier which was lightweight and fast.

Since the days that PS has ceased to improve its' products and with the arrival of GMail and increased search speed in Thunderbiird, all these things made me sway to the later.

For the record, here are Slaven's words i received by email:

"It has been a while since the last upgrade - I undertook a fairly major upgrade to the renderer and editor but PocoMail's aging dev environment is making it a lot harder than it should be! I am hoping to have something new for 2011, it all depends if we navigate out of the current tech problems."

If PocoSystems could make their program OpenSource then i'm sure it would beat any other email client out there.

MonBidoux wrote:For the record, here are Slaven's words i received by email:

"It has been a while since the last upgrade - I undertook a fairly major upgrade to the renderer and editor but PocoMail's aging dev environment is making it a lot harder than it should be! I am hoping to have something new for 2011, it all depends if we navigate out of the current tech problems."

If PocoSystems could make their program OpenSource then i'm sure it would beat any other email client out there.

SO from what you are stating there is active development going on - just more slowly than Slaven anticipated. I am assuming from the post that he is talking about the Delphi version he was using. This is not unique to Pocomail. Also to make it to the Open Source the Copyright etc would need to be addressed. Even Aboandonware is not considered in the Public Domain and available for Open Source status (unless I misinterpreted - which is possible - the Open Source concepts). See Wikepedia for a good definition of Abandoware and Public Domain concepts. Not all inclusive but a good starting point
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AbandonwareHopefully if the product is/was dead, the links to the purchase of Pocomail, Barca etc would be removed as it seems a bit dishonest (to me ok) to sell something that is in effect dead. As this has not happened I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt - at this point - that there will be some sort of development and expectation of a new product in the future. Funny how a lot of this seemed to occur after or at the same time as the association with RoseCity Software (Makers of Courier).

Actually, when i first wrote to Slaven, i had hoped that he himself would make a post in the forum. He answered me a week later and then i asked him if i could post his response (that you have now read). I still hesitated, in the hope that he would change his mind and finally post (which has not happened yet!).

Anyway, the fact that Barca or Poco haven't been upgraded over the last four years? doesn't give much confidence in his response.

The fact that he hasn't made any posts here in quite some time doesn't sound too good.

The fact that this forum was down for about a week not so long ago didn't help to give more confidence either.

So! Perhaps if people keep writing in on this thread or even better, email him via his Twitter account will have a positive impact (just like the thousands that worried about Xmarks shutting down).